Benchmarking With Real Workloads and the Benefits of Flash and Fast Interconnects

Benchmarking is a term heard throughout the tech industry as a measure of success and pride in a particular solution’s ability to handle this or that workload. However, most benchmarks feature a simulated workload, and in reality, a deployed solution may perform much differently. This is especially true with databases, since the types of data and workloads can vary greatly.

StorageReview.com and MarkLogic recently bucked the benchmarking trend, developing a benchmark that tests storage systems against an actual NoSQL database instance. Testing is done in the StorageReview lab, and the first round focused heavily on host-side flash solutions. Not surprisingly, flash-accelerated solutions took the day, with the lowest overall latencies for all database operations, generally blowing non-flash solutions out of the water and showing that NoSQL database environments can benefit significantly from the addition of flash-accelerated systems.

In order to accurately test all of these flash solutions, the test environment had to be set up so that no other component would bottleneck the testing. As it’s often the interconnect between database, client and storage nodes that limits overall system performance, StorageReview plumbed the test setup with none other than Mellanox ultra low-latency, FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand adapter cards and switches to ensure full flash performance realization and true apples-to-apples test results.